Biography
Don Cook is a multidisciplinary designer from Delran, New Jersey, with a background spanning fine art, graphic design, and UI/UX. He brings a perspective grounded equally in craft, innovation, and inquiry. Don approaches design as a perpetual student, driven by a passion for understanding how design shapes the ways people connect with ideas, systems, and one another.
Statement
As a designer with nearly three decades of professional experience, I approach this body of work as both a challenge and a release — an opportunity to disrupt my own habits and interrogate the boundaries between authorship, appropriation, and automation.
This capstone explores the role of the designer in an era of generative AI, where tools can originate content and influence creative decisions. Through experiments in typography, layout, and image generation, I examine where human intent ends and machine agency begins. Some works embrace ambiguity; others highlight structure. Together, they reflect an ongoing investigation into how we can ethically integrate emerging technologies without losing the values that ground our craft.
Rather than offering answers, this work invites reflection. On authorship. On originality. On the evolving creative process. It represents a process of unlearning and redefining, and asks how designers might remain intentional and curious in the face of rapid change.